Biography

“Kathy Mac sees inside language-as-propaganda, identifying all the twists and turns that facts suffer as they become half-truths or false justifications for evils, She knows and shows that the rhetoric of the War on Terror enacts a War on Truth. Accept no substitutes for her truth-telling, which is liberating.”

George Elliott Clarke
Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2016 to 2017 on Human Misunderstanding (Roseway Press, 2017)

Dr. McConnell publishes poetry under the pen name Kathy Mac. Her most recent book, Human Misunderstanding (Roseway, 2017) brings together three politically-charged long poems that critique myths about heroes, fantasies about love, and the perceived fairness of the Canadian justice system. Her first book of poems Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth (Roseway, 2001) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and won the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poems published in Canada that year, and her second, The Hundefräulein Papers (Roseway, 2010), examines her life during the final years of her Ph.D. studies when she was the live-in dogsitter/housekeeper for Elisabeth Mann Borgese, daughter of German Modernist author Thomas Mann, and also one of the architects of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

McConnell’s book of lyric scholarship Romance, Porn, Pain, and Complicity (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012) was supported by a SSHRC Research/Creation Grant.

At STU, Dr. McConnell teaches Creative Writing, required first and second year courses, and Canadian Poetry. Her creative work includes two published collections of poetry. Her recent scholarship focuses on contemporary Atlantic Canadian poetry, while in the past she has studied the gothic elements of popular culture texts like Twilight, Catwoman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.